Ethos

Miche (right) and Flora (left), Spier Farm, South Africa.

Studio Fabre Hardy expresses the solo and collaborative art-making of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Together, we create environments of experience, combining convivial ritual, ecological design, material artworks and multi-media performances, all to evoke the art of sympoiethics in the everyday. Our concept of sympoiethics recognises that the world comes into being through collective production and embodied making-with each other and the animate Earth. The art of sympoiethics enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday, through respecting and responding with the integrity of each other’s bodyminds and intelligences of the animate Earth.

“The call of our times is for artists to enfold our humanity back within the sacred whole of life. Studio Fabre Hardy is at the fore of creating such transformative experiences”. Professor Michel Pimbert, Director of the Institute for Sustainability, Equity and Resilience, Coventry University, UK

Indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen teachings, quantum thinking, archetypal cosmologies and shamanic ritual all guide the recovery of the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. Our work offers the space and conditions to discover how we, as humans, are part of the interdependent ecology of life. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies through a relationship to matter and living processes we become aware how the meaning and ethical decisions of our lives is grounded in material as well as spiritual connections with each other and the unfolding cosmos.

“The biological term sympoiesis describes the interconnected nature of ecosystems, which are distinguished by “linkages, feedback, co-operation, and synergistic behaviour rather than boundaries” (Dempster 2000: 4). The word derives from the Ancient Greek syn meaning ‘together with, jointly’, and poiein meaning ‘to make, create’, thus evoking the collective production of life. Adding ‘ethics’ to ‘sympoiesis’ highlights how human actions are an active influence within the ecological dynamics of adaptive, evolutionary world-making.” Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy (2022) ‘The Art of Sympoiethics’ in The Ecological Citizen

Based in the UK, our work is held within the geography of studios, an apothecary, food and herb gardens and farmed landscape of woods, fields and bodies of water. These dwelling spaces welcome the serendipitous, the unknown and the emergent for living artistic inquiries. Sequences of culinary fermentation, drawings and mark-making, composting practices, writing exchanges, artisan cooking, land husbandry, assemblages, installations, film, photographs - all are daily choreographies between inner human and outer world landscapes, visible and invisible energies, matter and metaphor, emotion and memory and the realms of the ancestral and archetypal. Rta is the Sanskrit term at the root of art, which translates as the dynamic flow of movement from which all arises. By reconnecting to its origins, we recover art, ritual and artisan practices as pathways for co-responding through all our senses and the sentience of the habitats we dwell within.

“What I value and treasure is the real deepened transformation - your healing of soul and soil. It emphasises that we are part of one system, but unless we transform our thoughts processes from deep within, from the soul, it will be superficial”. Daryl Jacobs, Deputy Director at Elsenburg Agricultural Training College, South Africa

Daily practical and imaginal experiences become the resources for constellating convivial ritual forms, material artworks, participatory shrines and installations, performances and curated environments. Artworks have been exhibited internationally, including: Arnolfini and Create Centre, Bristol, and Thames Festival Southwark Bridge, London; NIROX Foundation, Cradle of Humankind, and Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa; Ecovention Europe, Sittard, Netherlands; Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice, Italy. These rhythms of exchanges between the UK, Europe and Southern Africa are nurtured by our affiliation as honorary Research Associates with the Institute for Sustainability, Equity and Resilience at Coventry University, UK, and the Sustainability Institute in Lynedoch, South Africa.

The past, present and future flourish through making with, thinking with and feeling with the other-than-human world. Embodied, convivial and artful forms of secular ritual enable us to experience an interconnected sensibility that awakens our consciousness. Within bounded time and space, rituals offer safe refugia for nurturing solutions and inspiring practical, transformative action … All as part of a wider ethics of care for personal, cultural and ecological regeneration.